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Put it to the QM, and/or create a vote for the players.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
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I was going to type something here, then Torgamous took the words right out of my mouth. (in a good way)
Yeah, plus it is not like less agency is inherently negative. It often leads to a tighter narrative and a more focused approach and allows for a more focused discussion.
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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So I'd like to offer a tentative Excelsior refit schedule:
2315 - Courageous completes 5YM, goes to refit in Lor'Vela OCF
2316 - Courageous completes refit, goes back on 5YM. Enterprise completes 5YM, goes to refit in Lor'Vela OCF. Sarek also completes 5YM, but goes immediately back on new 5YM mission with no refit.
2317 - Enterprise completes refits, goes back on 5YM. Two non-EC Excelsiors go into refit at Lor'Vela OCF and Ana Font.
2318 - Two non-EC Excelsiors complete refit. One non-EC Excelsior goes into refit; also the Odyssey completes its 5YM and goes to refit.
2319 - Odyssey completes refit and goes back on 5YM. S'Harien completes 5YM and goes into refit. Atuin completes 5YM and goes into refit.
Something like that, where we ramp up into two Excelsiors in refit at any one time until all 18 started/completed before refit have been refitted to be Excelsior-As.
On the diplomacy topic.
First of all, I want to say that "This is not an Empire quest," is rapidly losing all meaning and degenerating into a "shut the discussion down" response that is annoying to read. We all know it's not a damn empire quest; saying it's not should not be a rhetorical weapon to tell people they are thinking wrong. Could we retire it for a while?
Okay, here's what I think people are missing. You notice how the Federation doesn't have a State Department or Secretary of State or whatever the equivalent for your country is? That's because that function has been split among multiple individuals. The Admiral of Starfleet has part of that portfolio, at least to a certain extent. The head of the Federation Diplomatic Service has another.
Our part is that we are presumed to have the latest and greatest news on what is important outside the Federation's borders. What we get to do is go to the Council and say, "Hey, this matters! This is what you should be paying attention to when it comes to foreign powers." That's a big part of Starfleet's job. What we don't do is set policy. We lay out the stakes and the situation and tell the Council what's important, and then they come back and tell us what they want to do about this important thing.
So we don't set policy, but we do set the agenda, to some extent.
2315 - Courageous completes 5YM, goes to refit in Lor'Vela OCF
2316 - Courageous completes refit, goes back on 5YM. Enterprise completes 5YM, goes to refit in Lor'Vela OCF. Sarek also completes 5YM, but goes immediately back on new 5YM mission with no refit.
2317 - Enterprise completes refits, goes back on 5YM. Two non-EC Excelsiors go into refit at Lor'Vela OCF and Ana Font.
2318 - Two non-EC Excelsiors complete refit. One non-EC Excelsior goes into refit; also the Odyssey completes its 5YM and goes to refit.
2319 - Odyssey completes refit and goes back on 5YM. S'Harien completes 5YM and goes into refit. Atuin completes 5YM and goes into refit.
Something like that, where we ramp up into two Excelsiors in refit at any one time until all 18 started/completed before refit have been refitted to be Excelsior-As.
On the diplomacy topic.
First of all, I want to say that "This is not an Empire quest," is rapidly losing all meaning and degenerating into a "shut the discussion down" response that is annoying to read. We all know it's not a damn empire quest; saying it's not should not be a rhetorical weapon to tell people they are thinking wrong. Could we retire it for a while?
Okay, here's what I think people are missing. You notice how the Federation doesn't have a State Department or Secretary of State or whatever the equivalent for your country is? That's because that function has been split among multiple individuals. The Admiral of Starfleet has part of that portfolio, at least to a certain extent. The head of the Federation Diplomatic Service has another.
Our part is that we are presumed to have the latest and greatest news on what is important outside the Federation's borders. What we get to do is go to the Council and say, "Hey, this matters! This is what you should be paying attention to when it comes to foreign powers." That's a big part of Starfleet's job. What we don't do is set policy. We lay out the stakes and the situation and tell the Council what's important, and then they come back and tell us what they want to do about this important thing.
So we don't set policy, but we do set the agenda, to some extent.
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Image - The Admiral - Muer'ci
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This is juuust a bit later than I planned for, but it's done, and I wanted to share.
Admiral Vitalia Yukiko Kahurangi (Commander, Starfleet from 2301-2311)
Not entirely happy with it, but I don't think I can do much better, yet.
So, yeah.
Admiral Vitalia Yukiko Kahurangi (Commander, Starfleet from 2301-2311)
Not entirely happy with it, but I don't think I can do much better, yet.
So, yeah.
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Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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- She/Her
[X][FACTION] Approach the Pacifists about the Diplomatic Service getting their shit together.
That's happened twice. The first time cost pp plus requiring a special vote option that was established just before the snakepit, and the story post indicated that the Council was already aware of both problems and just hadn't bothered addressing them. The second time a capitol city was nuked. That didn't really say to me that we're expected to be informing the council of problems as a matter of course, it looked to me in the first case like we were burning favors to force action and in the second case that political costs were being waived because a capitol city was nuked. If Starfleet was actually supposed to be doing what you say, wouldn't our interactions with the Diplomatic Service look more like the MWCO rather than only popping up when we or someone else force the issue?
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My issue is that we are, to borrow your phrasing, the only ones who have ever set the agenda, iirc. The council and FDS have pretty much never told us to do something regarding foreign nation states without prompting on our part. They've also never bothered with any sort of diplomatic agenda we didn't emphasize. If there's supposed to be other people with power over who the federation does diplomacy with, they don't seem to ever use it. Which ends up leaving it to us as starfleet to push diplomacy in order to purposely get closer relations with somebody, or to try and achieve anything with diplomacy.
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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There was that one time with the Dawiar, though that was getting in the way of a member ratification, iirc.
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That's not true at all. We get diplomatic missions all the time in Captain's Logs where diplomats are being ferried from x to y and this or that is being negotiated over.
Anyway, I like how things are.
I would agree with Kaze. The non-Starfleet organizations, especially the FDS, seem to have little power to propose a Diplomatic Agenda. Even the missions we get to ferry diplomats around are 90% of the time to do with our Snakepit requests or the results of diplo pushes we encouraged.
Random Member
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The way I see it, the Diplomatic Service is using most of its resources to continuously push affiliates (hence the yearly roll) and to solve inter-member disputes, while the diplopushes we request is the Admiral asking them to spend some resources on non-affiliates or to double down on an affiliate.
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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Which is fine normally, it just means that the Diplomatic Service is uniformly Development-leaning, but when it means they ignore wars on our doorstep or actually involving us it calls their judgement into question.
Perhaps we could consider using Sousa's ability to persuade the Expansionists and/or Pacifists to strengthen/expand the FDS's foreign diplomacy desk?
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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If the Diplomatic Service has small desks, that's their own fault.
So what would this look like game mechanically? What would you like to see?
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- Earth
Was just typing that up. All of this would need to be heavily fine tuned of course.
Just have a semi-random number of diplomacy pushes each year, say 1-6 based on the current federation's president, and council members, politics. (some parties would want more, some less; could adjust the number up or down if it's also replacing standard affiliate pushes)
The targets of the pushes would then once again be picked semi-randomly according to the president's and council's politics. (the hawks would be more focused on those useful against the cardassians. the development faction on current affiliates, ect)
Which quarter the diplomacy mission happens during is again picked randomly. (with say no more than 2 per quarter)
And finally we as starfleet are required by the council to supply a ship, EC or regular, to ferry the diplomats. (failing to supply a ship gets a PP penalty but the mission still goes ahead, using an explorer gives a bonus, ect)
Snakepit options could then become us pushing through, or blocking, another diplomatic push or trying to change the target of one or the quarter it's going to happen during, ect.
This is very bare-bones, but workable.
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Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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The MWCO, but for where diplomacy should be happening instead of what ships are being built.
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That looks too rapid to me, particularly for the EC, which we depend on for pp and rp. I wouldn't start any refits of EC ships before we have a substantial yearly pp income again and either a rp reserve or enough rp income to be sure of being able to keep all teams active. I expect that to be the case before the end of the decade, but even then I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to waiting until the USS Ambassador enters service (presumably in the EC).
Overall I could see us refitting one ship per year until 2320 (possibly two in some years when berth availability/resource stockpile/crew projections call for it, but not three like you have for 2317, or two EC ships like you have for 2319), then two per year. Stretching it out until 2326 doesn't seem too bad to me, if in exchange we avoid income shortfalls and leaving important sectors without their anchor ship.
There are a couple of techs that offer random pushes to non-affiliates and they have been relatively high priority. 2310s Diplomacy is the closest of those and is going to finish next year.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I like it. Is that Kahurangi or Sousa? Note that Sousa is South American, so her skin tone is up in the air somewhat. My only point of criticism is that her nose seems kind of low-set relative to her mouth and eyes. But I like it.
That ties into my earlier speculation- that the institutional culture of the FDS comes out of the 2200s-era need to create amity and unity within the Federation. Given that the TBG Federation hasn't incorporated any new members since its founding, this may well have been a full-time job for their organization, for quite a long time. Shifting to a more Expansionist stance (i.e. non-isolationist, actively seeking out crises on the borders and dealing with them before they become military problems for Starfleet to handle) seems like something that would take time and a major paradigm shift.
Prior to game start, it seems as though the only really major, pushy, active foreign diplomacy we had was with the Romulans and Klingons. And almost by definition any dealings with them would heavily involve Starfleet. To the point where previous generations of Starfleet Admirals may have actively pushed to get external policy into the hands of Starfleet at the expense of the FDS, indirectly creating the very situation we are now unhappy with.
Remember how Federation diplomatic representatives from the TOS era always seemed to be bozos? Yeah, that. I bet the Admiral of Kirk's time was desperate to get the FDS out of the external diplomacy business, and focused on the internal diplomacy front where they seem to have actually done a good job convincing the four core members that they're part of a unified nation rather than a loose confederacy.
I think this is an extremely good idea.
Well, we might expect to see the Council initiating special sessions similar to the ones we had on the Sydraxian and Apiata issues in 2312, instead of us having to burn political will to get them to even talk about things. We might expect to see the president calling us in to give recommendations on things like the Licori-Ked Paddah War.
That's already happened in the past- we had something like that for the Caitian-Dawiar War, and for the Anti-Syndicate act. But it seems like our post-2310 problems have just been allowed to build up and build up until we wound up having to talk the Council into doing anything about them, much as we would have had to talk them into building a new shipyard or an Academy annex for ourselves.
It's reasonable for us to have to spend political will to convince the Council to make specific policy decisions we'd like to see.
It's not reasonable for us to have to spend political will to convince the Council that decisions need to be made at all.
I'd actually rather NOT see this part in particular, though. My reasoning is that our existing 'relationship stats' with minor species represent a constant ongoing stream of diplomatic dialogue; people at 250 with us are people we're talking to, have an embassy with, et cetera. The FDS wouldn't be 'pushing' those species any more actively than it already is. Nor would/should it decide to 'push' neutrals into becoming affiliates without a calculated decision by the Council to do so. Remember that expansionism is not the default; it is a specific political stance by a specific party within the Federation that does not control a majority or even a plurality.
However, the FDS and the Council almost certainly would be engaging in regular diplomatic missions like the ones you discuss, with the potential for br/sr/rp/pp payoffs. And us having options to support some of those sounds good.
- Location
- USA
On refits with 4 finishing in 2315 refitting 2 then let us push builds on 2 berths to the next year. Also I would rather have only on EC ship under refit at any given time.
On diplomacy Starfleet has a very broad mission statement, it is a military, scientists and diplomats so yes we are going to have more say than normal in diplomacy. We are the ones to make first contact and for ships and personnel tapped for follow up contacts. The FDS seems to deal with internal diplomacy along with following up on contacts and bringing them into the fold.
We do not see that unless they request a ride and thus show up in the Captain's log since we see things through starfleet view point. A lot of it is happening in the background.
On diplomacy Starfleet has a very broad mission statement, it is a military, scientists and diplomats so yes we are going to have more say than normal in diplomacy. We are the ones to make first contact and for ships and personnel tapped for follow up contacts. The FDS seems to deal with internal diplomacy along with following up on contacts and bringing them into the fold.
We do not see that unless they request a ride and thus show up in the Captain's log since we see things through starfleet view point. A lot of it is happening in the background.
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Ahem. Since it would be a pointless gesture for me to even bother voting on the snakepit plans as such...
[X][FACTION] Approach the Mercantilists about a diplomatic/financial push to assist the Orions with their political and economic transition.
[But I'm voting either for the 'get the FDS off its butt' idea OR the 'do something about the Ked Paddah war' idea next year]
[X][FACTION] Approach the Mercantilists about a diplomatic/financial push to assist the Orions with their political and economic transition.
[But I'm voting either for the 'get the FDS off its butt' idea OR the 'do something about the Ked Paddah war' idea next year]
I actually agree with you on 2317 and if you go back and look at the current version I pared it back to two refits.
I think on the EC, there's competing drives. Refitting them means that they're more likely to pass Explorer-DC events, and we've had both awful failures (Courageous, Miracht) and serious nailbiters (S'Harien nearly is hijacked) in the past. +1 to 4 different stats is amazing. However I acknowledge 2 EC at once might be too many. How about we ramp up to two refits a year, but never more than 1 EC ship in refit in a single year?